Fire at Moscow dorm for foreign students kills 32

Published: November 23, 2003 7:00 PM

MOSCOW (AP) An early-morning fire on Monday raced through a Moscow dormitory packed with students from Africa, Asia and Latin America, killing at least 32 people and injuring 139 many of them forced to jump from the five-story building because the exits were blocked.

The fire quickly engulfed most of the dilapidated building housing students of the Patrice Lumumba Friendship of Peoples University, said Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov. The building served as a quarantine facility for newly arrived foreign students needing medical checks before starting their studies.

It was like a horrible nightmare, said Abdallah Bong, a student from Chad looking at the gutted building. We saw them crying for help and jumping out of the windows, and we could do nothing to save them.

Pavel Klimovsky, a Moscow police spokesman, said 28 bodies were recovered inside the building, which housed 272 students, three were found outside and one person died in an ambulance. He said 50 of the injured were in serious condition.

Bong and other witnesses said fire engines were slow to start action as they jammed into a narrow access road blocked by parked cars, unable to stop the flames from gutting most of the dormitory above the ground floor.

The fire burned for more than three hours. Smoke poured from windows as a wet snow fell in the pre-dawn darkness, and, after the fire was put out, the buildings concrete walls were streaked with dark black soot. Nearby trees were caked with ice that had formed from water used to extinguish the blaze.

A friend of mine who arrived just a few days ago broke his leg when he jumped out the window, and I dont know what happened to another friend, Nafafe Tengna, a third-year journalism student from Guinea, said as he waited for authorities to distribute a list of victims.